Wow. This place really died, eh?

[Figment]

Tbh I've always seen more issues being reported by people that I would relate to personal hardware, internet providers and geographic location of the client than to SOE server and network maintenance.

Server and network issues are always going to happen in any company, let alone a MMO company.



New bugs that didn't appear in patch testing are also to be expected since the scope of the implementation and potentially affected things tend to be hard to foresee and oversee in advance, with many complications not being reproducable on small scale testing or easily overlooked.

[Hamma]

Cool to see all the old faces around here having a discussion despite the past some of us have had. Great discussion guys. I need to conjure up some thoughts on this and make a post when I get some time.

[Hamma]

So my thoughts on this relate to support of the community and SOE itself. I feel like you guys dug into the game mechanics a bunch.

First off let me say this - the game isn't dead. It was dead for a ton of people before they even gave it a chance. And most of those people were... here on PSU. It's certainly not as successful as it could or should have been. Which brings me to my first thought.

SOE started to drift away from this website I'd say after the first six months or so. It appeared they got most of the feedback they wanted from the original PS1 vets and moved on to another method of feedback. It's not a mystery that the majority of users of this forum are PlanetSide 1 vets and honestly (my opinion) would probably never be convinced PlanetSide 2 was any good unless it was a prettier reskinned version of PlanetSide 1.

I continued to reach out to the devs and Jen and I were lucky enough to be able to participate in a variety of promotional things for the game. Which brings me to my next point..

SOE and the team wasted entirely too many cycles on MLG and promoting it. I was at the various events where PlanetSide 2 was promoted and it largely felt like somewhat of an afterthought. Sure I think it brought some players to the game.. but no real effort was ever put in to making the game actually work for any sort of competition (despite whether you think it should have had a competitive side or not) it felt like they only went half way. A variety of community driven events were largely hamstrung by the fact they had to find 300 workarounds to broadcast the game and do a competition.

I think that some of the cardinal mistakes that have been made by SOE continue to be made to this day on other games. And that is continuing to take feedback from communities that may not actually be playing their games. The constant reliance on Reddit, Twitter, etc I believe is a mistake and I also believe only relying on a fan website is a mistake. I think some of the failures we have seen are due to people giving feedback who are either negative or just simply not playing.

That's about all I have on my brain right now. I believe with this last round of layoffs the team has truly been gutted of its heart and soul. The game as you see it now is what it will remain until the servers are turned off someday. We will only see performance improvements, optimizations, occasional balance. I doubt we will see new features, or continents.

SOE/DBG suffer from a massive "ooohhhh shiny" complex. Most of the games they are making require real long term investment but they are treated more like short term projects. This wasn't really a mystery to any of us here.

[Figment]

I think the main problem with SOE is the long term vision (you touched on that in the last point). I think that includes taking on too many projects and assigning inexperienced (though motivated) people to work in game genres they're not really familiar with.

And I've heard from many sources they don't have a good coding standard. Remember how messy the code was of PS1? Remember Beady commenting on how the code came without any notes about what parts of the code did?


PS2 often felt to me like RPG designers creating a FPS. The bases were designed around fitting in the landscape, but not to function defensively. Lots and lots of time has been wasted on creating then recreating and recreating the same continents.

They should have looked for experience they didn't have on the team. Personally I would have advised bringing in a military engineer as advisor for base design.

I also think that there's a big issue in knowledge transfer within the company. Where Arclegger was starting to create better bases (as I think we all agree), other devs were still making open boxes. There should have been a core principle on base design. Where all PS2 bases went out of their way to be different and nifty scenery (nice in itself for lore), there was no structure to it. In contrast, PS1 bases all shared the same principles through all base types, making it easier for players to "learn" how a base functioned and should be controlled in defense or attack due to its multi-linear battle flow, even if the layouts differed.

With PS2, not only did you have to learn each base lay-out and environment, each base would have different principles to capture, there were few ways to control a base as there was no linear flow at all. And jetpacks. I think one of the biggest flaws was adding jetpacks for regular infantry. Jetpacks in PS1 had limited impact due to being VS only and MAX only. Mossiedroppers were frequently hated and feared for very good reason: for taking the height advantage from the defenders and bringing the fight from just ONE new direction in a tower fight: above. Same goes for HARTing in on squad leaders (and overlooking the ease of switching squad leader).

I really don't think they had a thorough idea what impact jetpacks would have on every aspect of the game by handing over the height advantage to people (particularly taking it from the defenders) so easily, but just thought "it's the future and it's cool, let's do it". I'm quite sure they trivialised the impact it would have.

[NCLynx]

Hey cool my password worked.

Don't leave home without a REK.

[p0intman]

Originally Posted by NCLynx

Hey cool my password worked.

Don't leave home without a REK.

REK CHECK!

[Calista]

Just from my own unscientific observation I can see that forum activity has dropped off substantially across the board and yes even the hallowed Reddit. Reflective of the game population I suppose but things have definitely quieted down from even just a few months ago.

[Baneblade]

The game itself seems to be doing alright. I think it is just the development cycle that has been somewhat obfuscated.

Like... weren't we three months away from heavy buggies nine months ago?

[Figment]

Originally Posted by Baneblade

The game itself seems to be doing alright. I think it is just the development cycle that has been somewhat obfuscated.

Like... weren't we three months away from heavy buggies nine months ago?

PS4 implementation has simply put everything else on the backburner. That was to be expected since the game had to be retrofitted for cross-platform design.

[Baneblade]

True enough, but even so, they could still be a little more forthcoming with that sort of information.